1.
Anthropology
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Anthropology is the study of various aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies, linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the development of humans. The abstract noun anthropology is first attested in reference to history and its present use first appeared in Renaissance Germany in the works of Magnus Hundt and Otto Casmann. Their New Latin anthropologia derived from the forms of the Greek words ánthrōpos and lógos. It began to be used in English, possibly via French anthropologie, various short-lived organizations of anthropologists had already been formed. The Société Ethnologique de Paris, the first to use Ethnology, was formed in 1839 and its members were primarily anti-slavery activists. When slavery was abolished in France in 1848 the Société was abandoned and these anthropologists of the times were liberal, anti-slavery, and pro-human-rights activists. Anthropology and many other current fields are the results of the comparative methods developed in the earlier 19th century. For them, the publication of Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species was the epiphany of everything they had begun to suspect, Darwin himself arrived at his conclusions through comparison of species he had seen in agronomy and in the wild. Darwin and Wallace unveiled evolution in the late 1850s, there was an immediate rush to bring it into the social sciences. When he read Darwin he became a convert to Transformisme. His definition now became the study of the group, considered as a whole, in its details. Broca, being what today would be called a neurosurgeon, had taken an interest in the pathology of speech and he wanted to localize the difference between man and the other animals, which appeared to reside in speech. He discovered the speech center of the brain, today called Brocas area after him. The title was translated as The Anthropology of Primitive Peoples. The last two volumes were published posthumously, Waitz defined anthropology as the science of the nature of man. By nature he meant matter animated by the Divine breath, i. e. he was an animist and he stresses that the data of comparison must be empirical, gathered by experimentation

2.
Zora Neale Hurston
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Zora Neale Hurston was an African-American novelist, short story writer, folklorist, and anthropologist. Of Hurstons four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, Hurston was the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston, two former slaves. Her father was a Baptist preacher, tenant farmer, and carpenter and she was born in Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7,1891, where her father grew up and her grandfather was the preacher of a Baptist church. When she was three, her moved to Eatonville, Florida, in 1887 it was one of the first all-black towns to be incorporated in the United States. Hurston said she felt that Eatonville was home to her as she grew up there. Her father later was elected as mayor of the town in 1897 and in 1902 became preacher of its largest church, Hurston later used Eatonville as a backdrop in her stories. It was a place where African Americans could live as they desired, in 1901, some northern schoolteachers visited Eatonville and gave Hurston a number of books that opened her mind to literature, she described it as a kind of birth. Hurston spent the remainder of her childhood in Eatonville, and describes the experience of growing up there in her 1928 essay, How It Feels to Be Colored Me. Her father remarried to Matte Moge, this was considered a minor scandal, Hurstons father and stepmother sent her away to a Baptist boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida. They eventually stopped paying her tuition and the school expelled her and she later worked as a maid to the lead singer in a traveling Gilbert & Sullivan theatrical company. In 1917, Hurston began attending Morgan College, the school division of Morgan State University. At this time, apparently to qualify for a free high-school education and she graduated from the high school of Morgan State University in 1918. In 1918, Hurston began her studies at Howard University, where she one of the earliest initiates of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc. and co-founded The Hilltop. While there, she took courses in Spanish, English, Greek and public speaking, in 1921, she wrote a short story, John Redding Goes to Sea, which qualified her to become a member of Alaine Lockes literary club, The Stylus. Hurston left Howard in 1924 and in 1925 was offered a scholarship by Barnard trustee Annie Nathan Meyer to Barnard College, Columbia University, Hurston received her B. A. in anthropology in 1928, when she was 37. While she was at Barnard, she conducted research with noted anthropologist Franz Boas of Columbia University. She also worked with Ruth Benedict as well as fellow anthropology student Margaret Mead, after graduating from Barnard, Hurston spent two years as a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University. Living in Harlem in the 1920s, Hurston befriended the likes of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and her apartment, according to some accounts, was a popular spot for social gatherings

3.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
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Benjamin Lee Whorf was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer. Whorf is widely known as an advocate for the idea that differences between the structures of different languages shape how their speakers perceive and conceptualize the world, throughout his life Whorf was a chemical engineer by profession, but as a young man he took up an interest in linguistics. At first this interest drew him to the study of Biblical Hebrew and this led him to begin studying linguistics with Edward Sapir at Yale University while still maintaining his day job at the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. During his time at Yale he worked on the description of the Hopi language, and he was chosen as the substitute for Sapir during his medical leave in 1938. Whorf taught his seminar on Problems of American Indian Linguistics, many of his works were published posthumously in the first decades after his death. Critics argued that Whorfs ideas were untestable and poorly formulated and that they were based on badly analyzed or misunderstood data, the son of Harry Church Whorf and Sarah Edna Lee Whorf, Benjamin Lee Whorf was born on April 24,1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Harry Church Whorf was an artist, intellectual and designer – first working as a commercial artist, Benjamin had two younger brothers, John and Richard, who both went on to become notable artists. Benjamin was the intellectual of the three and at an age he conducted chemical experiments with his fathers photographic equipment. He was also a reader, interested in botany, astrology. He read William H. Prescotts Conquest of Mexico several times, at the age of 17 he began to keep a copious diary in which he recorded his thoughts and dreams. Whorf graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1918 with a degree in chemical engineering where his performance was of average quality. In 1920 he married Celia Inez Peckham, who became the mother of his three children, Raymond Ben, Robert Peckham and Celia Lee, around the same time he began work as a fire prevention engineer for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. He was particularly good at the job and was commended by his employers. His job required him to travel to production facilities throughout New England to be inspected, one anecdote describes him arriving at a chemical plant in which he was denied access by the director because he would not allow anyone to see the production procedure which was a trade secret. Having been told what the plant produced, Whorf wrote a chemical formula on a piece of paper, saying to the director, the surprised director asked Whorf how he knew about the secret procedure, and he simply answered, You couldnt do it in any other way. Whorf helped to attract new customers to the Fire Insurance Company, another famous anecdote from his job was used by Whorf to argue that language use affects habitual behavior. Whorf argued that by speaking of the vapor-filled drums as empty and by extension as inert. Whorf was a man throughout his lifetime although what religion he followed has been the subject of debate

4.
Marcel Griaule
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Marcel Griaule was a French anthropologist known for his studies of the Dogon people of West Africa, and for pioneering ethnographic field studies in France. In 1920 he returned to university, where he attended the lectures of Marcel Mauss, intrigued by anthropology, he gave up plans for a technical career. In 1927 he received a degree from the École Nationale de Langues Orientales, between 1928 and 1933 Griaule participated in two large-scale ethnographic expeditions—one to Ethiopia and the ambitious Dakar to Djibouti expedition which crossed Africa. On the latter expedition he first visited the Dogon, the group with whom he would be forever associated. In 1933 he received a diploma from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in religion, throughout the 1930s Griaule and his student Germaine Dieterlen undertook several group expeditions to the Dogon area in Mali. During these trips Griaule pioneered the use of photography, surveying. In 1938 he produced his dissertation and received a based on his Dogon research. He died in 1956 in Paris, Griaule is remembered for his work with the blind hunter Ogotemmeli and his elaborate exegeses of Dogon myth and ritual. His study of Dogon masks remains one of the works on the topic. Griaule is the father of anthropologist Geneviève Calame-Griaule, Marcel Griaule, Burners of men, Modern Ethiopia. Marcel Griaule, Masques dogons, Institut dEthnologie,1938 Marcel Griaule, Jeux dogons, Institut dEthnologie,1938 Marcel Griaule, Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmeli, An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas. ISBN 0-19-519821-2, originally published in 1948 as Dieu dEau, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, The Pale Fox, originally published as Le Renard Pâle, Institut dEthnologie,1965. Walter E. A. van Beek, Dogon Restudied, A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule, Marcel Griaule, Methode de lEtnographie, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris,1957. El Método de la Etnografía, Nova, Buenos Aires,1969, Dogon people Germaine Dieterlen Jean Rouch Isabelle Fiemeyer, Marcel Griaule, citoyen dogon, Actes Sud 2004 Laird Scranton, Revisiting Griaules Dogon Cosmology. Anthropology News, Vol.48, No 4 Tracking the Pale Fox - documentary and notes by Luc de Heuch having Griaule as central figure

Whorf's illustration of the difference between the English and Shawnee gestalt construction of cleaning a gun with a ramrod. From the article "Language and Science", originally published in the MIT technology Review, 1940. Image copyright of MIT Press.